Help on the Nuclear Constants Query Page

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Click here to go to the Nuclear Constants Query page.

Introduction:

The Nuclear Constants Query page gives access to information on nuclear isotopes. It knows about nearly 1700 isotopes. Information that is available through this page includes:

• List of all isotopes for a given mass number A.
• The mass excess, including experimental uncertainties, for a given isotope.
• The binding energy, including experimental uncertainties, for a given isotope.
• The atomic mass, including experimental uncertainties, for a given isotope.
• Lists of all known isotopes.
• Lists of all isotopes of a given element, including number of protons Z and number of neutrons N.

The page is divided into three sections:

1. List Isotopes for a Given Mass Number.
2. List Various Properites for an Isotope.
3. List Isotopes with N and Z Values According to Element.

These are discussed in order below.

The mass number, isotope or element for which information is desired is entered in "forms" with the keyboard. Beside each form is a button labelled Reset. This button clears the contents of the form. In the examples below, this Reset button is not shown.

List Isotopes for a Given Mass Number

The "mass number" is the total number of nucleons (protons plus neutrons) in a nucleus.

This section of the Nuclear Constants Query page lists all known isotopes of a given atomic mass number. For example, the following fragment from the page asks for all the isotopes with an atomic mass number of 23.

Clicking on the button above labelled:

	List all elements with this atomic mass

will list all isotopes with atomic mass number = 23. The input must be an integer between 1 and 263.

LIST VARIOUS NUCLEAR PROPERTIES FOR AN ISOTOPE

This section of the Nuclear Constants Query page allows the retrieval of some numerical properties for a specific isotope. The data available are:

Mass Excess

The actual value of the atomic mass minus the mass number.

Binding Energy

The difference between the mass of the free constitutents and the mass of the bound system.

Atomic Mass

The exact value of the mass of a neutral atom.

The following fragment from the Nuclear Constants Query page returns all three properties for Sodium-23,

If desired, one may point and click at one of the buttons just over the input form to produce only one of the types of data for the given isotope.

There is also a button is this section of the Nuclear Constants Query page that produces the (lengthy) list of all the known isotopes.

LIST ISOTOPES WITH N AND Z VALUES ACCORDING TO ELEMENT

This section of the Nuclear Constants Query page lists all known isotopes of a given chemical element. It also returns N, the number of neutrons, and Z, the number of protons.

The following fragment will return the isotopes for sodium:

Note that because of ambiguities such as between a neutron (symbol "n") and Nitrogen (symbol "N"), when the input is a symbol of an element as above upper-case and lower-case letter distinctions are important.

The following fragment also returns information for sodium.

Note that in this example upper-case and lower-case letter distinctions are ignored.

This section of the Nuclear Constants Query page also provides a button that will list all known elements.

Finally, we hope that the Nuclear Constants Query page provides convenient and simple access to the desired information. For more advanced explorations of nuclear physics, such as comparing the mass excess as a function of atomic number and producing a graph of the relation for a range of isotopes, you may wish to know that the same information that is accessed by this page is available as a Mathematica package. This package is available from Wolfram Research Inc., the author of Mathematica, in the MathSource archive accessible from http://www.wolfram.com; the package is item 0206-064. It was written by David Harrison, UPSCALE, Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Toronto, Sept. 1994.

For people holding valid accounts on UPSCALE, this package is already installed and a notebook describing its use is available locally.

This help page was written by David Harrison, UPSCALE, Dept. of Physics, Univ. of Toronto, August 1996. This is version 1.4, date (m/d/y) 08/28/96.